Namibia segregated: Old Nazi ideology persists

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. View his other books here. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

There is hardly any place in Africa, where divisions between the races and classes would be so grotesquely overstated, as in Namibia.

Lavish villas, cafes as
well as cultural centers surround old German churches, but just a
few miles away, there are gaping slums lacking all the basic
services. The white and black divide is striking, with some
neighborhoods that are housing ‘colored people’, placed
right in between.

The center of Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, has an
unmistakably Germanic orderly feel, boasting ‘colonial
architecture’, including flowerpots, Protestant churches and
commemorative plaques mourning those ‘brave German men, women
and children, those martyrs, who died during the uprisings and
wars conducted by local indigenous people’.

The most divisive and absurd of those memorials is the so-called
“Equestrian Monument”, more commonly known as “The
Horse” or under its German original names,
‘Reiterdenkmal’ and ‘Südwester Reiter’ (Rider
of the South-West). It is a statue inaugurated on 27 January
1912, which was the birthday of German Emperor Wilhelm II. The
monument ‘honors the soldiers and civilians that died on the
German side of the Herero and Namaqua War of 1904–1907’.

To be precise,
that‘war’was not really a war; it was nothing
more than genocide, a holocaust.

Of course there were many holocausts committed by the Europeans
in Africa, from British and French slave trade hunts, to about 10
million innocent people murdered in cold blood in what is now DR
Congo, during the reign of (in Europe) a very revered Belgian
monarch, King Leopold II.

Namibia was a prelude to what German Nazis later tried to achieve
on European soil. Like the French in some of their Caribbean and
Pacific colonies, the ‘success rate’ of German
colonizers was almost complete, around 80%.

A European expert working for the UN, my friend, speaks, like
almost everyone here, passionately, but without daring to reveal
her name:

“The first concentration camps on earth were built in this
part of Africa… They were erected by the British Empire in South
Africa and by Germans here, in Namibia. Shark Island on the coast
was the first concentration camp in Namibia, used to murder the
Nama people, but now it is just a tourist destination, mainly for
the divers – you would never guess that there were people
exterminated there. Here in the center of Windhoek, there was
another extermination camp; right on the spot where ‘The Horse’
originally stood.”

‘The Horse’ was recently removed from its original
location, and placed in the courtyard of the old wing of The
National Museum, together with some of the most outrageous
commemorative plaques, glorifying German actions in this part of
the world. Nothing was destroyed, instead just taken away from
prime locations.

Where ‘The Horse’ stood, there now stands a proud
anti-colonialist statue, that of a man and a woman with broken
shackles, which declares, ‘Their Blood Waters Our
Freedom’.

A visit to those German genocidal relics is ‘an absolute
must’ for countless Central European tourists that descend
every day on this country, mainly on their ‘grand southern
African tour’ that includes South Africa, Botswana and
Namibia. I followed several of those groups, listening to their
conversations. Among their members, there appears to be no
remorse, and almost no soul-searching: just snapshots, posing in
front of the monuments and racist insignias, pub-style/beer jokes
at places where entire cultures and nations were exterminated!

Central European, German-speaking tourists in Windhoek, appear to
be lobotomized, and totally emotionless. And so are many of the
descendants of those German ‘genocidal pioneers’.
Encountering them is like déjà vu; it brings back memories of the
years when I was fighting against the German Nazi colony,
‘Colonia Dignidad’ in Chile; or when I was investigating
the atrocities and links, of the German Nazi community in
Paraguay to several South American fascist regimes that had been
implanted and maintained by the West.

And now the German community in Namibia is protesting the removal
of ‘The Horse’. It is indignant. And this community is
still powerful, even omnipotent, here in Namibia.

Almost nobody calls the ‘events’ that took place here,
by their rightful names, of holocaust or genocide. Everything in
Namibia is ‘sensitive’.

But even according to the BBC: “In 1985, a UN report
classified the events as an attempt to exterminate the Herero and
Nama peoples of South-West Africa, and therefore the earliest
attempted genocide in the 20th Century.”

On 21 October 2012, the Canadian daily newspaper, The Globe and
Mail, reported:

“In the bush and scrub of central Namibia, the descendants of
the surviving Herero live in squalid shacks and tiny plots of
land. Next door, the descendants of German settlers still own
vast properties of 20,000 hectares or more. It’s a contrast that
infuriates many Herero, fuelling a new radicalism here.

Every year the Herero hold solemn ceremonies to remember the
first genocide of history’s bloodiest century, when German troops
drove them into the desert to die, annihilating 80 percent of
their population through starvation, thirst, and slave labor in
concentration camps. The Nama, a smaller ethnic group, lost half
of their population from the same persecution.

New research suggests that the German racial genocide in
Namibia from 1904 to 1908 was a significant influence on the
Nazis in the Second World War. Many of the key elements of Nazi
ideology – from racial science and eugenics, to the theory of
Lebensraum (creating ‘living space’ through colonization) – were
promoted by German military veterans and scientists who had begun
their careers in South-West Africa, now Namibia, during the
genocide…”

The Namibian government is still negotiating the return (from
Germany) of all skulls of the local people, which were used in
German laboratories and by German scientists to prove the
superiority of the white race. German colonialists decapitated
Herero and Nama people, and at least 300 heads were transported
to German laboratories for ‘scientific research’. Many
were ‘discovered’ in the Medical History Museum of the
Charite Hospital in Berlin, and at Freiburg University.

A leading German doctor, who was working on ‘the pure race
doctrine’ in Namibia (the doctrine later used by the Nazis),
was Eugen Fischer. He ‘educated’ many German physicians,
including Doctor Mengele.

It is of little surprise, considering that the first German
governor of the colony was the father of Hitler’s deputy Herman
Goering.

Germany never officially apologized for its crimes against
humanity in what it used to call German South-West Africa. It did
not pay reparations.

Nor did, of course, most of other European colonial powers, from
Portugal, the UK and France. When one of the greatest African
leaders, Patrice Lumumba, and democratically elected President of
Congo, declared that Africa has nothing to be grateful to
European colonial powers, he was murdered in cold blood by the
alliance of Belgian, British and the US nations.

Divisions are shocking: ideological, racial, social.

In Namibia, there is segregation on an enormous scale,
everywhere.

While neighboring South Africa is moving rapidly away from racial
segregation, introducing countless social policies, including
free medical care, education and social housing, Namibia remains
one of the most segregated countries on earth, with great private
services for the rich, and almost nothing for the poor majority.

“Apartheid was even worse here than in South Africa”, I
am told by my friend from the United Nations. “And until now…
You go to Katutura, and you see who is living there, they are all
local people there, all black. Katutura literally means ‘We have
no place to stay’. Fifty percent of the people in this city
defecate in the open. Sanitation is totally disastrous. Then you
go to Swakop city, on the shore, and it is like seeing Germany
recreated in Africa. You also see, there, shops with Nazi
keepsakes. Some Nazis, who escaped Europe, came to Windhoek, to
Swakop and other towns. In Swakop, men march periodically, in
replicas of Nazi uniforms.”

Katutura is where the black people were moved to, during
apartheid.

My friend, a ‘colored’ Namibian, who fought for the
independence of his own country and of Angola, drove me to that
outrageous slum which seems to host a substantial amount of the
capital’s population, with mostly no access to basic sanitation
or electricity.

He has also chosen to remain anonymous, as he has explained, in
order to protect his lovely family. To speak up here, unlike in
South Africa, which may, these days, be one of the freest and
most outspoken places on earth, can be extremely dangerous. But
he clarifies further:

“In Namibia, it is very rare for people who used to suffer,
to speak about it publicly. In South Africa, everyone speaks. In
Angola, everyone speaks… But not here.”

Then he continues:

“What we can see in Namibia is that many German people are
still in control of big business. They are ruling the country.
They have hunting farms and other huge estates and enterprises.
Germans bring money to Namibia, but it stays with them, and it
consolidates their power – it does not reach the majority. You
cannot even imagine, how much local people working on their
farms, are suffering. It is still like slavery. But it is all
hushed up here.”

For many decades, the official history interpreted by Western
mass media and academia, about the rise of Nazism in Germany went
roughly like this: “Treaty of Versailles signed in 1919, was
‘too tough’. German nation got humiliated, impoverished, and as a
result, extremism, including the extreme nationalism and Nazism,
had risen. Consequently, Hitler and his clique managed to grab
the power.”

How many thinkers: historians, philosophers and writers lamented:
“How could a moderate and essentially peaceful nation of
Goethe, Beethoven, Bach - Germany - produce such a monstrous
ideology? How could it, without any warning, begin to exterminate
millions of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Slavs, handicapped people, and
the leftists?”

But... Was Germany really a ‘moderate nation’? Think
twice! In Europe, in the 1930’s and 40’s, Germany simply and
painstakingly copied the crimes that it used to regularly commit
in its colonies, particularly in what was known as
‘South-West Africa’, now Namibia.

The southern part of Africa is where the British and German
empires built the first concentration camps on earth. It is where
the people were treated as sub-humans, as animals, and it is
where entire nations were exterminated.

Until now, there was no apology and hardly any acknowledgement of
the history, coming from Europe.

In recent history, the West was openly supporting the apartheids
in South Africa and in Namibia, as well as a brutal civil war in
neighboring Angola.

The nightmares of Goering and Mengele had their preludes and
aftershocks performed in this part of the world.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.